Threat actor Ryushi claims to have accessed a database of 400m Twitter users’ private info and is offering to sell it exclusively to prevent misuse. Cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock has disclosed that a threat actor is trying to sell the users’ data of 400 million Twitter customers containing private information about celebrities, politicians, and companies.
Some of the big names include former U.S. President Donald Trump, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary, billionaire investor Mark Cuban, and lots more.
According to Hudson Rock, the threat actor claimed the data was obtained earlier this year via a Twitter vulnerability. The database contains information about the breached Twitter users, including their emails, account creation dates, and phone numbers.
The actor, who goes by the name Ryushi, has asked the Twitter management team and its new owner Elon Musk to reach out to specified accounts to strike a bargain for an exclusive buy-out to prevent the wrong people from getting a hold of the data.
Ryushi told Musk that failure to cooperate would attract GDPR breach fines of up to $276 million, just like Facebook did when over 500 million users’ data was exposed.
“Twitter or Elon Musk, if you’re reading this you are already risking a GDPR fine over 5.4m imaging the fine if 400m users breach. Your best option to avoid paying $276 million USD in GDPR breach fines like Facebook did (due to 533m users being scraped) is to buy this data exclusively…,” the message read.